As somebody who is not particularly religiously observant, I find myself endlessly amused, and bemused, by the efforts of some Irish Catholics to transform their Church into the Church of England. I imagine Henry VIII, who had tremendous difficulty persuading the Irish to adopt Anglicanism, must be looking up (heh) from the afterlife in abject amazement:
Demands by Irish Catholics for major change in the church’s attitude to women, LGBTI+ people, those who are divorced or remarried, and single parents have been sent to Rome. They have also urged the removal of the mandatory celibacy rule for priests.
In a covering letter sent with a report outlining the demands, Catholic Primate Archbishop Eamon Martin told Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, that it pointed “to many challenges for the handing on of the faith in this country, including a need for inner healing and hope, especially among those who have suffered abuse by church personnel and in church institutions”.
Former president Mary McAleese on Tuesday night described the document as “explosive, life altering, dogma altering, church altering”.
There is, of course, a Christian Church – and a very fine one – on this island which doctrinally permits married and gay clergy, divorce, contraception, and all the other bells and whistles of modern sexual politics. Indeed, the Anglican church was founded, we might remember, on the principle that people should be able to divorce their wives and marry a lascivious young one who caught their eye, and then, should it be required, chop the new wife’s head off and find another, and another, and another, and so on. All very Godly.
I joke there, Protestant friends, but I joke to make a point: The Anglican Communion is a fine church filled with good and decent and patriotic Christians, but it was founded explicitly in opposition to some of the teachings of the Roman Catholic church. It is, and has ever been, the natural home for Christians of a different view on these matters to that of Rome.
The Roman Catholic church, by contrast, was willing to lose millions of English faithful on the basis that certain principles were inviolable: Sanctity of marriage, and the sacraments, and the supremacy of the Pope, and all that.
There is irony, then, that in 2022 Mary McAleese, of all people, should be trying to do to the Irish Catholic church what Henry VIII could not: Convince it of the need to move with the times, man.
There’s a line in the document, by the way, which stood out to me, but did not get a mention in the Irish Times coverage. Have a read:
Some participants were concerned that some younger priests are very traditional and rigid in their thinking and may not have the requisite skills for co-responsible leadership.
“Traditional and rigid in their thinking”, for those unfamiliar with the language of Ireland’s internal catholic civil war, effectively means that younger priests believe in the things that the church teaches today. It is worth noting that this is, therefore, a synodal document that explicitly criticises priests for believing and teaching what the Church says they should believe and teach. No wonder Mrs. McAleese describes it as “church altering”.
My friend Declan Ganley, who, I suspect, leans more towards the younger Priests on these matters, notes that he and others who take his view were denied an opportunity to participate:
This is amusing. McAleese has a place that offers most of the things she wants in a church, it’s the Church of Ireland. The Catholic Church is not going to become the Church of Ireland. It is puzzling how Mary got to contribute to this report but for example, I did not. https://t.co/tkz4YAYXyS
— Declan Ganley (@declanganley) August 17, 2022
There’s an extent to which all of this is not really religious at all: For a great many of these pro-reform catholics, theology is not the greatest amongst their concerns. Read the document they have produced in full, and you’ll find that theology gets barely a mention. The real truth of it is more banal: These people are simply embarrassed by the conservatism of their church. The Irish church has no shortage of trendy older priests who came of age in the 1960s who share the same views on social and political issues as Michael D Higgins: They’re a little embarrassed when they’re singled out at events to defend the church’s teaching on things like homosexuality: “Well that wouldn’t be my personal view now” is their stock, almost reflexive, defence against social pressure. In the culture of Ireland in 2022, being seen as a “pro-reform” catholic is about the only way to be seen as a “good” catholic outside the church. Our definition of the phrase has changed: “Good Catholic” used to mean people who went to mass and observed the sacraments. Now it means a catholic who publicly disagrees with the Pope on women priests. A church that is supposed to concern itself with the afterlife and all that now concerns itself to a troubling extent with how it is perceived by the – ahem – pharisees. I’m not certain that’s what Jesus of Nazareth had in mind when he was being crucified for his beliefs.
And this is the ultimate problem: For a church to have any relevance at all, it must have, and advocate, some eternal truths. It must speak those truths to power: That is what the Roman Church did, for all its faults and flaws, when it told the King of England he could not commit adultery. People died – people were burned – for that belief. For that same church now, just four centuries later, to endorse adultery and so on would be a shocking insult to the memory of its own martyrs, who thought that they were dying for an eternal truth.
If it is the fate of the Irish Church to die, then it will die. But it should die with its head held high for the things it believes to be eternally true. Not crawling on its belly before the whims of the moment, just to keep poor Mary McAleese happy. She is Protestant, not Catholic. She just can’t admit it to herself.